The Illusion of Freedom
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_illusion_of_freedom_20151227/
Posted on Dec 27, 2015
By Chris Hedges
A campaign rally last week in Michigan. In the current presidential
contest, a frustrated white working class has been receptive to
anti-democracy messages. (Carlos Osorio / AP)
The seizure of political and economic power by corporations is unassailable.
Who funds and manages our elections? Who writes our legislation and laws?
Who determines our defense policies and vast military expenditures? Who is
in charge of the Department of the Interior? The Department of Homeland
Security? Our intelligence agencies? The Department of Agriculture? The Food
and Drug Administration? The Department of Labor? The Federal Reserve? The
mass media? Our systems of entertainment? Our prisons and schools? Who
determines our trade and environmental policies? Who imposes austerity on
the public while enabling the looting of the U.S. Treasury and the tax
boycott by Wall Street? Who criminalizes dissent?
A disenfranchised white working class vents its lust for fascism at Trump
campaign rallies. Naive liberals, who think they can mount effective
resistance within the embrace of the Democratic Party, rally around the
presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, who knows that the
military-industrial complex is sacrosanct. Both the working class and the
liberals will be sold out. Our rights and opinions do not matter. We have
surrendered to our own form of wehrwirtschaft. We do not count within the
political process.
This truth, emotionally difficult to accept, violates our conception of
ourselves as a free, democratic people. It shatters our vision of ourselves
as a nation embodying superior virtues and endowed with the responsibility
to serve as a beacon of light to the world. It takes from us the right to
impose our fictitious virtues on others by violence. It forces us into a new
political radicalism. This truth reveals, incontrovertibly, that if real
change is to be achieved, if our voices are to be heard, corporate systems
of power have to be destroyed. This realization engenders an existential and
political crisis. The inability to confront this crisis, to accept this
truth, leaves us appealing to centers of power that will never respond and
ensures we are crippled by self-delusion.
The longer fantasy is substituted for reality, the faster we sleepwalk
toward oblivion. There is no guarantee we will wake up. Magical thinking has
gripped societies in the past. Those civilizations believed that fate,
history, superior virtues or a divine force guaranteed their eternal
triumph. As they collapsed, they constructed repressive dystopias. They
imposed censorship and forced the unreal to be accepted as real. Those who
did not conform were disappeared linguistically and then literally.
The vast disconnect between the official narrative of reality and reality
itself creates an Alice-in-Wonderland experience. Propaganda is so
pervasive, and truth is so rarely heard, that people do not trust their own
senses. We are currently being assaulted by political campaigning that
resembles the constant crusading by fascists and communists in past
totalitarian societies. This campaigning, devoid of substance and
subservient to the mirage of a free society, is anti-politics.
No vote we cast will alter the configurations of the corporate state. The
wars will go on. Our national resources will continue to be diverted to
militarism. The corporate fleecing of the country will get worse. Poor
people of color will still be gunned down by militarized police in our
streets. The eradication of our civil liberties will accelerate. The
economic misery inflicted on over half the population will expand. Our
environment will be ruthlessly exploited by fossil fuel and animal
agriculture corporations and we will careen toward ecological collapse. We
are free only as long as we play our assigned parts. Once we call out
power for what it is, once we assert our rights and resist, the chimera of
freedom will vanish. The iron fist of the most sophisticated security and
surveillance apparatus in human history will assert itself with a terrifying
fury.
The powerful web of interlocking corporate entities is beyond our control.
Our priorities are not corporate priorities. The corporate state, whose sole
aim is exploitation and imperial expansion for increased profit, sinks money
into research and development of weapons and state surveillance systems
while it starves technologies that address global warming and renewable
energy. Universities are awash in defense money but cannot find funds for
environmental studies. Our bridges, roads and levees are crumbling from
neglect. Our schools are overcrowded, decaying and being transformed into
for-profit vocational centers. Our elderly and poor are abandoned and
impoverished. Young men and women are crippled by unemployment or
underemployment and debt peonage. Our for-profit health care drives the sick
into bankruptcy. Our wages are being suppressed and the power of government
to regulate corporations is dramatically diminished by a triad of new trade
agreementsthe Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Transatlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership and the Trade in Services Agreement. Government
utilities and services, with the implementation of the Trade in Services
Agreement, will see whole departments and services, from education to the
Postal Service, dismantled and privatized. Our manufacturing jobs, sent
overseas, are not coming back. And a corporate media ignores the decay to
perpetuate the fiction of a functioning democracy, a reviving economy and a
glorious empire.
The essential component of totalitarian propaganda is artifice. The ruling
elites, like celebrities, use propaganda to create false personae and a
false sense of intimacy with the public.
The emotional power of this narrative is paramount. Issues do not matter.
Competency and honesty do not matter. Past political stances or positions do
not matter. What is important is how we are made to feel. Those who are
skilled at deception succeed. Those who have not mastered the art of
deception become unreal. Politics in totalitarian societies are
entertainment. Reality, because it is complicated, messy and confusing, is
banished from the world of mass entertainment. Clichés, stereotypes and
uplifting messages that are comforting and self-congratulatory, along with
elaborate spectacles, replace fact-based discourse.
Entertainment was an expression of democracy, throwing off the chains of
alleged cultural repression, Neal Gabler wrote in Life: The Movie: How
Entertainment Conquered Reality. So too was consumption, throwing off the
chains of the old production-oriented culture and allowing anyone to buy his
way into his fantasy. And, in the end, both entertainment and consumption
often provided the same intoxication: the sheer, endless pleasure of
emancipation from reason, from responsibility, from tradition, from class
and from all the other bonds that restrained the self.
The more communities break down and poverty expands, the more anxious and
frightened people will retreat into self-delusion. Those who speak the
truthwhether about climate change or our system of inverted
totalitarianismwill be branded as seditious and unpatriotic. They will be
hated for destroying the illusion. This, as Gabler noted, is the danger of a
society dominated by entertainment. Such a society, he wrote,
took dead
aim at the intellectuals most cherished values. That theme was the triumph
of the senses over the mind, of emotion over reason, of chaos over order, or
the id over the superego.
Entertainment was Platos worst nightmare. It
deposed the rational and enthroned the sensational and in so doing deposed
the intellectual minority and enthroned the unrefined majority.
Despair, powerlessness and hopelessness diminish the emotional and
intellectual resilience needed to confront reality. Those cast aside cling
to the entertaining forms of self-delusion offered by the ruling elites.
This segment of the population is easily mobilized to purge the nation of
dissenters and human contaminants. Totalitarian systems, including our
own, never lack for willing executioners.
Many people, maybe even most people, will not wake up. Those rebels who rise
up to try to wrest back power from despotic forces will endure not only the
violence of the state, but the hatred and vigilante violence meted out by
the self-deluded victims of exploitation. The systems of propaganda will
relentlessly demonize those who resist, along with Muslims, undocumented
workers, environmentalists, African-Americans, homosexuals, feminists,
intellectuals and artists. The utopia will arrive, the state systems of
propaganda will assure its followers, once those who obstruct or poison it
are removed. Donald Trump is following this script.
The German psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm in his book Escape
From Freedom explained the yearning of those who are rendered insignificant
to surrender their freedom. Totalitarian systems, he pointed out, function
like messianic religious cults.
The frightened individual, Fromm wrote, seeks for somebody or something
to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer,
and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the
elimination of this burden: the self.
This is the world we live in. The totalitarian systems of the past used
different symbols, different iconography and different fears. They rose up
out of a different historical context. But they too demonized the weak and
persecuted the strong. They too promised the dispossessed that by subsuming
their selves into that of demagogues, or parties or other organizations that
promised unrivaled power, they would become powerful. It never works. The
growing frustration, the ongoing powerlessness, the mounting repression,
leads these betrayed individuals to lash out violently, first at the weak
and the demonized, and then at those among them who lack sufficient
ideological purity. There is, in the end, an orgy of self-immolation. The
death instinct, as Sigmund Freud understood, has a seductive allure.
History may not repeat itself. But it echoes itself. Human nature, after
all, is constant. We will react no differently from those who went before
us. This should not dissuade us from resisting, but the struggle will be
long and difficult. Before it is over there will be blood in the streets.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
The Illusion of Freedom
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_illusion_of_freedom_20151227/
Posted on Dec 27, 2015
By Chris Hedges
A campaign rally last week in Michigan. In the current presidential contest,
a frustrated white working class has been receptive to anti-democracy
messages. (Carlos Osorio / AP)
The seizure of political and economic power by corporations is unassailable.
Who funds and manages our elections? Who writes our legislation and laws?
Who determines our defense policies and vast military expenditures? Who is
in charge of the Department of the Interior? The Department of Homeland
Security? Our intelligence agencies? The Department of Agriculture? The Food
and Drug Administration? The Department of Labor? The Federal Reserve? The
mass media? Our systems of entertainment? Our prisons and schools? Who
determines our trade and environmental policies? Who imposes austerity on
the public while enabling the looting of the U.S. Treasury and the tax
boycott by Wall Street? Who criminalizes dissent?
A disenfranchised white working class vents its lust for fascism at Trump
campaign rallies. Naive liberals, who think they can mount effective
resistance within the embrace of the Democratic Party, rally around the
presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, who knows that the
military-industrial complex is sacrosanct. Both the working class and the
liberals will be sold out. Our rights and opinions do not matter. We have
surrendered to our own form of wehrwirtschaft. We do not count within the
political process.
This truth, emotionally difficult to accept, violates our conception of
ourselves as a free, democratic people. It shatters our vision of ourselves
as a nation embodying superior virtues and endowed with the responsibility
to serve as a beacon of light to the world. It takes from us the right to
impose our fictitious virtues on others by violence. It forces us into a new
political radicalism. This truth reveals, incontrovertibly, that if real
change is to be achieved, if our voices are to be heard, corporate systems
of power have to be destroyed. This realization engenders an existential and
political crisis. The inability to confront this crisis, to accept this
truth, leaves us appealing to centers of power that will never respond and
ensures we are crippled by self-delusion.
The longer fantasy is substituted for reality, the faster we sleepwalk
toward oblivion. There is no guarantee we will wake up. Magical thinking has
gripped societies in the past. Those civilizations believed that fate,
history, superior virtues or a divine force guaranteed their eternal
triumph. As they collapsed, they constructed repressive dystopias. They
imposed censorship and forced the unreal to be accepted as real. Those who
did not conform were disappeared linguistically and then literally.
The vast disconnect between the official narrative of reality and reality
itself creates an Alice-in-Wonderland experience. Propaganda is so
pervasive, and truth is so rarely heard, that people do not trust their own
senses. We are currently being assaulted by political campaigning that
resembles the constant crusading by fascists and communists in past
totalitarian societies. This campaigning, devoid of substance and
subservient to the mirage of a free society, is anti-politics.
No vote we cast will alter the configurations of the corporate state. The
wars will go on. Our national resources will continue to be diverted to
militarism. The corporate fleecing of the country will get worse. Poor
people of color will still be gunned down by militarized police in our
streets. The eradication of our civil liberties will accelerate. The
economic misery inflicted on over half the population will expand. Our
environment will be ruthlessly exploited by fossil fuel and animal
agriculture corporations and we will careen toward ecological collapse. We
are free only as long as we play our assigned parts. Once we call out
power for what it is, once we assert our rights and resist, the chimera of
freedom will vanish. The iron fist of the most sophisticated security and
surveillance apparatus in human history will assert itself with a terrifying
fury.
The powerful web of interlocking corporate entities is beyond our control.
Our priorities are not corporate priorities. The corporate state, whose sole
aim is exploitation and imperial expansion for increased profit, sinks money
into research and development of weapons and state surveillance systems
while it starves technologies that address global warming and renewable
energy. Universities are awash in defense money but cannot find funds for
environmental studies. Our bridges, roads and levees are crumbling from
neglect. Our schools are overcrowded, decaying and being transformed into
for-profit vocational centers. Our elderly and poor are abandoned and
impoverished. Young men and women are crippled by unemployment or
underemployment and debt peonage. Our for-profit health care drives the sick
into bankruptcy. Our wages are being suppressed and the power of government
to regulate corporations is dramatically diminished by a triad of new trade
agreementsthe Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Transatlantic Trade and
Investment Partnership and the Trade in Services Agreement. Government
utilities and services, with the implementation of the Trade in Services
Agreement, will see whole departments and services, from education to the
Postal Service, dismantled and privatized. Our manufacturing jobs, sent
overseas, are not coming back. And a corporate media ignores the decay to
perpetuate the fiction of a functioning democracy, a reviving economy and a
glorious empire.
The essential component of totalitarian propaganda is artifice. The ruling
elites, like celebrities, use propaganda to create false personae and a
false sense of intimacy with the public.
The emotional power of this narrative is paramount. Issues do not matter.
Competency and honesty do not matter. Past political stances or positions do
not matter. What is important is how we are made to feel. Those who are
skilled at deception succeed. Those who have not mastered the art of
deception become unreal. Politics in totalitarian societies are
entertainment. Reality, because it is complicated, messy and confusing, is
banished from the world of mass entertainment. Clichés, stereotypes and
uplifting messages that are comforting and self-congratulatory, along with
elaborate spectacles, replace fact-based discourse.
Entertainment was an expression of democracy, throwing off the chains of
alleged cultural repression, Neal Gabler wrote in Life: The Movie: How
Entertainment Conquered Reality. So too was consumption, throwing off the
chains of the old production-oriented culture and allowing anyone to buy his
way into his fantasy. And, in the end, both entertainment and consumption
often provided the same intoxication: the sheer, endless pleasure of
emancipation from reason, from responsibility, from tradition, from class
and from all the other bonds that restrained the self.
The more communities break down and poverty expands, the more anxious and
frightened people will retreat into self-delusion. Those who speak the
truthwhether about climate change or our system of inverted
totalitarianismwill be branded as seditious and unpatriotic. They will be
hated for destroying the illusion. This, as Gabler noted, is the danger of a
society dominated by entertainment. Such a society, he wrote,
took dead
aim at the intellectuals most cherished values. That theme was the triumph
of the senses over the mind, of emotion over reason, of chaos over order, or
the id over the superego.
Entertainment was Platos worst nightmare. It
deposed the rational and enthroned the sensational and in so doing deposed
the intellectual minority and enthroned the unrefined majority.
Despair, powerlessness and hopelessness diminish the emotional and
intellectual resilience needed to confront reality. Those cast aside cling
to the entertaining forms of self-delusion offered by the ruling elites.
This segment of the population is easily mobilized to purge the nation of
dissenters and human contaminants. Totalitarian systems, including our
own, never lack for willing executioners.
Many people, maybe even most people, will not wake up. Those rebels who rise
up to try to wrest back power from despotic forces will endure not only the
violence of the state, but the hatred and vigilante violence meted out by
the self-deluded victims of exploitation. The systems of propaganda will
relentlessly demonize those who resist, along with Muslims, undocumented
workers, environmentalists, African-Americans, homosexuals, feminists,
intellectuals and artists. The utopia will arrive, the state systems of
propaganda will assure its followers, once those who obstruct or poison it
are removed. Donald Trump is following this script.
The German psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm in his book Escape
From Freedom explained the yearning of those who are rendered insignificant
to surrender their freedom. Totalitarian systems, he pointed out, function
like messianic religious cults.
The frightened individual, Fromm wrote, seeks for somebody or something
to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer,
and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the
elimination of this burden: the self.
This is the world we live in. The totalitarian systems of the past used
different symbols, different iconography and different fears. They rose up
out of a different historical context. But they too demonized the weak and
persecuted the strong. They too promised the dispossessed that by subsuming
their selves into that of demagogues, or parties or other organizations that
promised unrivaled power, they would become powerful. It never works. The
growing frustration, the ongoing powerlessness, the mounting repression,
leads these betrayed individuals to lash out violently, first at the weak
and the demonized, and then at those among them who lack sufficient
ideological purity. There is, in the end, an orgy of self-immolation. The
death instinct, as Sigmund Freud understood, has a seductive allure.
History may not repeat itself. But it echoes itself. Human nature, after
all, is constant. We will react no differently from those who went before
us. This should not dissuade us from resisting, but the struggle will be
long and difficult. Before it is over there will be blood in the streets.
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